And if there were two, how many more? Sergeant Chapelle set his men to examining every face, and with each positive identification, his world tilted farther off its axis. Pierre Montrand. Josephine Poumer. Darien Lemarche. Gaston Carnot, the Marquis de Brielles. No, they couldn't put a name to every face, nor even a face to every victim. But every last soul they could identify hailed from the ranks of Davillon's rich and powerful; each name they recorded was another House about to become the stuff of rumor, another god bereft of a most eminent follower.

Swallowing his distaste, Sergeant Chapelle ordered a more thorough search of the room. If there were clues to be found, they could well be hidden beneath a carpeting of blood, and they weren't about to leap out and reveal themselves.

The Guardsmen applied an extra dose of the disease-shielding camphor to their noses, swallowed their rising gorges, and began to sift.

A pair of fearful eyes in an oceanic shade, hovering indecisively on the cusp between blue and green, blinked open to watch the Guardsmen anxiously from above. The rafters atop which the blood-smeared figure had scurried-which were utterly unnecessary in the arched stone chamber, possibly left over from the days of construction-were thin, dusty, precarious. Yet she crouched among them carelessly, a human spider clinging to her perch, breathing through her mouth in a futile attempt to avoid the grisly fetor.

Her whole body trembled as a thrill of panic danced spastically up her spine, sending a trickle of dust raining from the rafters. Her own fear momentarily overwhelmed by this external, alien emotion, she twisted her head to glance over her shoulder, though she knew no one was present.

Not physically, at least.

“Stop that!” she hissed in a raw whisper. “This is hard enough without you distracting me!”